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Developer Meeting Notes: September 7, 2014

15

Ton Roosendaal shares the notes from today's meeting in irc.freenode.net, #blendercoders.

Hi all,

Here are the notes from today's 1600 CEST meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders.

1) Upcoming Blender 2.72 release

  • Planning did not change, today we go to "BCon4" (preparing test builds, only work on essential fixes).
  • Bug tracker is down to 128 open bugs!
  • Sergey Sharybin pointed at the too long list of fixes made by Gavin Howard. Help is awesome, but it's overshooting a bit. Only mention fixes compared to the 2.71 release.  It's also good to use the format/structure as we did before. And mention proper revision range.
  • Ton Roosendaal confirms that active Blender developers (2 or more commits in a Blender release in past year) can get a free Blender Conference ticket (129 euro value). Mail ton at blender.org to get this organized or to discuss whether you're eligible!
  • Thomas Dinges proposes to make Cycles the standard render engine in 2.72. Meeting is a bit afraid to do that right before a release, but it can be done fright after. Ton insists on proper testing if defaults work fine then (adding primitives, new materials), and to make sure the docs are updated.

2) Other projects

  • Patch for inclusion after 2.72 is out: Input for complex east asian characters. Chinese/Japanese users please test it!
  • Meeting agrees that the fracture modifier deserves a review right after the release too.
  • Long discussion then happened about the state of FBX I/O. We need more help on testing here and gathering reference cases. Bastien Montagne has a (complex) patch waiting for review that might help things too.
  • The bf-gamedev list will get contacted to also evaluate if there's no alternative for FBX... anyone we put on this task gets depressed mostly... Autodesk not releasing reliable format specs (and changing spec at will) makes fbx a real hard choice.

Thanks,

-Ton-

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

15 Comments

      • William Armstrong on

        Alembic's strength is its precomputed animation. It is designed to speed up rendering by doing this calculation. While it has been used in games for specific large scale morphing, such as ships that break apart around you in real time, it is not really suitable for animations of game characters, that often need to switch between different animations to provide controllable players.

        While FBX is not limited to games, it is the main use case they are trying to target. However, I do think a sane open standard is needed in this space.

        • Francis Tyrone Pimenta on

          i don't know it it makes sense but the sidefx houdini file format (bgeo, geo) is pretty open and it's based on json. the support on the main apps (maya, 3ds max, unity, unreal) is thanks to the plugin under development. it has also less limitations then the fbx file format or at lease better to implement. :-)

  1. "Patch for inclusion after 2.72 is out: Input for complex east asian characters. Chinese/Japanese users please test it!"

    Now this is something that should have been in a long time ago and will make blender's asian audience very happy.

    Give me a zipped source + VS2013 solution file and i'll build and test it on a dozen computers with a room full of japanese guys

      • More than an offer it's a critique about the increased complexity to build blender on x64 windows for those who only wish to build the most up-to-date version with a certain patch for testing purposes. kjym3 was kind enough to add a build for his patch, but only x64 shows up on graphicall, which means to test on 32bit machines the tester would need to build blender with all dozen or so of it's convoluted steps and iffy settings.

  2. Physics, physics, physics, for God's sake, please. Proper hair simulation in motion. Better fluids (a lava fountain, anyone?) More than one smoke/fire domain per scene (try to film 5 minutes of Pompeii with 1 domain per file!) Better soft bodies (proper muscle bulge?) Object tracking. And not only more pre-sets, but how about including a folder of code templates, both in Python (a beginning of an add-on, a custom menu, etc.) and in OSL?
    And yes, bring Cycles as the default engine on! Might also consider checking out nVidia GRID (virtual GPUs, to make a long story short), and how this could be used in a future cloud rendering.

  3. I'm loving this Freudian slip...

    " Thomas Dinges proposes to make Cycles the standard render engine in 2.72. Meeting is a bit !afraid! to do that right before a release, but it can be done !fright! after."

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